Historical Memory and Its (Dis)contents (original) (raw)
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Violence and the politics of memory in a global context: an overture
Culture & History Digital Journal, 2014
Engaging with a growing body of literature regarding post-violence remembrance, this article considers how distinct disciplines approach the study of contemporary "memory cultures" and addresses the issues that arise when violent pasts are considered in a global, comparative perspective. The paper reflects on theoretical and conceptual debates that have emerged in the permanent seminar, Traces and Faces of Violence, an intellectual ILLA-CCHS-CSIC-based symposium dedicated to the interdisciplinary, comparative analysis of post-violence memory cultures in different social, political and historical contexts. It identifies two specific arenas of interpretation that have been particularly useful for engaging with global memory studies literature: the historical, judicial, political, social and personal discourses regarding the past and reflections on the relationship between memory and materiality. By "traveling" through a series of case studies and by identifying their points of convergence, as well as their points of tension, this "overture" suggests that we approach the temporal and spatial movement of memory, as well as its immobility, as two ends in the process of remembering. In doing so, the article illustrates how local case studies inform, shape and transform globally circulating discourses and how the emergent transnational repertoire of knowledge regarding violent pasts provides a framework for reacting to a wide variety of local struggles.
Introduction: Violence, Justice and the Work of Memory
The search for historical justice has become one of the defining features of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. So has the consensus about the need to remember the violence of past injustices and its victims. The search for justice is closely related to a focus on remembrance: the striving for justice relies on memories of injustices, and the public remembering of past wrongs is increasingly considered one crucial means of redressing such wrongs. This focus section brings together authors from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, ranging from anthropology to law, and from cultural studies to political science. Focusing on post-conflict societies in Africa (Morocco, Rwanda), Asia (Nepal), Latin America (Argentina, Peru, Uruguay) and the Pacific (Solomon Islands), the papers explore aspects of the work of memory in attempts to redress past wrongs and make the present inhabitable. This introduction also extends some of the themes that connect the seven individual papers.
'Introduction: Memory and Violence,' Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 38/2 (2009)
Memory is a defining feature of the human condition. But the vectors and social dynamics of memory, the linkages between the individual and the collective, and the roles that traces of the past play in constituting identities and in shaping political life are complex, varied and contested. So too are the ethical demands that memory makes on us. What is clear, though, is that violence – its grim modalities, its diffuse consequences, its representation and comprehension – must stand at the centre of any understanding of memory and politics. The articles in forum explore some of the intersections between memory, politics and violence. In this introduction I set the scene for them, examining some of the relevant issues at stake and outlining some of the key positions in the scholarly literature.
Memories from the margins: violence and counter-narratives � introduction
Journal of the British Academy, 2021
This supplementary issue looks at how informal, often unrecognised, memory practices are used to deal with the legacy of violent conflict as a way to heal trauma, demand justice, and build sustainable peace. By drawing on case studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, India, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Syria, and Vietnam, the articles examine informal practices of memorialisation that challenge amnesia and hegemonic discourses of conflict by creating spaces for dialogue and exchange.
History, Memory and Forgetting: Political Implications*
RCCS Annual Review, 2009
Researchers have raised questions about recovering traumatic situations such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Vietnam war or the fratricidal massacres in Yugoslavia. Although some classic studies have identified important aspects relating to history and memory, there are several ways of dealing with the past, all of which involve interests, power and exclusion. The politics of just memory with regard to crimes committed in the past, a debate in which various academic areas as well as society in general have been involved, depends on processes of selection and also on elements which extend beyond the scope of human reason. It is necessary to find a balance between an obsession with the past and attempts to impose forgetting. Our aim, therefore, is to extend our understanding of history, memory and forgetting, emphasizing their limits as well as their ethical and moral implications.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 challenges memory studies to analyze transmissions of discourses which justify mass violence and challenge the focus on denial. On the one hand, the Russian regime's claim to undertake "denazification" and prevent a "genocide" expounds the seminal role of cultural memory in politics. The weaponization of history, international law, and religion is widely accepted in Russian society and by global populisms. On the other hand, the invasion came as a surprise even to many experts because in politics, media, and research, justifications of mass violence are often dismissed as pretexts distracting from facts. Yet, the dismissal entails a major lacuna: we know too little about how justifications travel through societies and have a long-term impact. The article proposes that while acts of mass violence alter political and socioeconomic realities, justifications of mass violence establish the linguistic and heuristic parameter for their subsequent juridical, moral, and scholarly evaluation. Normalizations of justifications contribute to perpetuating societal fault lines and set the frame for further conflict. The memory studies focus on transgenerational transmissions of psycho-social sequalae of violence laid the groundwork for understanding longue durée transmissions. However, memory studies have focused on denial as a key psychological and political driving force of transmissions, while, for instance, Russian and Serbian memory cultures are shaped by both denial and outright affirmations-not-even-denial-of past mass violence as model for present politics. Memory studies provide the appropriate conceptual space as a framework for addressing implicit normalizations and explicit affirmations of justifications of mass violence.
2020
This volume examines the ways in which the violent legacies of the twentieth century continue to affect the concept of the nation. Through a study of three societies' commemoration of notorious episodes of 1930s state violence, the author considers the manner in which attention to the state violence authoritarianism, and exclusions of the last century have resulted in challenges to dominant conceptions of the nation. Based on extensive ethnographic research in El Salvador, Spain, and the Dominican Republic, Remembering Violence focuses on new public sites of memory, such as museum exhibitions, monuments, and commemorations-powerful loci for representing ideas about the nation-and explores the responses of various actors-civil society, government, and diasporic citizens-as well as those of UN and other international agencies invested in new nation-building goals. With attention to the ways in which memory practices explain ongoing national exclusions and contemporary efforts to contest them, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in public memory and commemoration.
Introduction: Outlines of a New Politics of Memory in the Middle East
Mediterranean Politics, 2008
While the historical trajectories of emergent attempts to deal with legacies of political violence in the Arab Middle East differ widely, certain commonalities can help us understand this new field across the region. On the one hand, evidence presented in this volume suggests that grassroots movements have to some extent succeeded in ending the politics of pretence and denial that long dominated Arab states. On the other hand, particular political groupings and media monopolize discourses of a universally applicable process of truth and reconciliation in a way that consciously makes use of international idioms, but effectively obfuscates other aspects of social and political justice and reform.
Gender, Resistance and Transnational Memories of Violent Conflicts
Memory politics and transitional justice, 2020
The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely developed in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and (re-)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from historical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and historical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but also practitioners in the related fields. The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines-including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies-that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional justice in national, comparative, and global perspective.
Violent recall: Genocide memories, literary representation, and cosmopolitan memory’
Remembrance and Forgiveness Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Genocide and Mass Violence, 2020
This chapter focuses on a selection of contemporary literary representations of genocide memories from discrete geocultural contexts, from Croatia to the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The assumption is that a response to globalization and the increased homogenization of the world may perhaps be available in the cosmopolitanization of memories of genocide. These memories originating, admittedly, in diverse memory cultures, may, however, be read in conjunction with one another in order to generate a global memory regime that can serve as a foundation for human rights discourses. The word “regime” is not indicative of a totalizing or oppressive system. Rather, the chapter title, with a direct reference to the work of Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodkin (2003), suggests formal and informal practices of remember- ing, codes, and norms that structure, however loosely, the process of recall. While it is conceded that memory-subjects emerge from such structures, they are not necessarily to be treated as oppressed citizens of a regime of memorizing, memo- rializing, or mourning. This chapter further argues that literary fiction dealing with genocide, civil war, refugee crisis, and unrest from around the world enables us to craft a different geography of the globe, one that is based on geocultural resonances of the shared precarity encoded in genocide memories. It proposes that a cross-traumatic affiliation (Craps, 2013) is possible through global circulation of such texts. They serve as soft weapons (Whitlock, 2007)1 in response to globalization.